Chicken Tagine with Preserved Lemon and Olives

Chicken Tagine with Preserved Lemon and Olives (Djaj Mqualli)

In Moroccan Arabic: دجاج مقلي بالحامض المرقد والزيتون. Mqualli is the name of a sauce, not of a dish: a golden sauce based on saffron, ginger and turmeric, as opposed to mhammer — the red sauce based on paprika and cumin. In Hebrew it is written “טאג’ין” and sometimes “טאזין.”

This is the best-known Moroccan dish outside Morocco after couscous, and it is built on the tension between two completely different tart ingredients: preserved lemon, whose saltiness is deep and whose bitterness is mellowed, and green olives, which are salty in a different way. What unites them is a large amount of onion that melts into the sauce.

Prep time: 20 minutes (plus marinating) · Cook time: 60-75 minutes · Total: about an hour and a half · Yield: 4 servings · Difficulty: easy-medium

The tagine is the vessel, not the dish

“Tagine” sounds like the name of a food, but in Moroccan Arabic it is the name of the clay pot with the tall conical lid. Everything cooked in it is named after it, so there is chicken tagine, kefta tagine, fish tagine and vegetable tagine — dishes with nothing in common except the vessel.

The conical lid has a real mechanical role. During cooking, steam rises from the food, hits the sloping walls of the cone, condenses there and flows back down along the walls. The result is a closed loop: the dish loses almost no liquid, so meat and vegetables can be cooked in it with almost no added water — the liquid comes from the vegetables themselves. That is why a tagine sauce comes out concentrated in flavor even though it was never reduced over high heat.

Unglazed clay has a second role: it conducts heat poorly, distributing it slowly and evenly, which allows long cooking over a low flame without burning the bottom. A heavy cast-iron pot is the closest substitute. A real clay tagine must be soaked in water before its first use, and must not go from hot to cold — the clay cracks.

Ingredients (for 4 servings)

• 1.2 kg chicken pieces bone-in and skin-on — thighs and leg quarters (see chicken breast for a comparison of cuts)
• 3 large onions (about 350 grams), very thinly sliced
• 4 cloves garlic, crushed
• 40 ml olive oil
• 1 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1 teaspoon turmeric
• A generous pinch of saffron, soaked in a tablespoon of hot water
• 1/2 teaspoon coarsely ground black pepper
• 1 whole preserved lemon, cut into quarters (the peel is what matters, not the flesh)
• 100 grams pitted green olives
• A bunch of cilantro and a bunch of parsley, chopped
• 150 ml water or chicken stock
• Salt — carefully, because of the lemon and olives

Choosing ingredients and substitutes

Preserved lemon in a jar is available at delis and spice shops. If you don’t have any, add a fine zest of half a lemon and 1–2 tablespoons of lemon juice at the finishing stage instead of the preserved lemon quarters; the flavor will be fresher and less pickled. Regular green olives, drained of their brine, work. You can leave out the saffron, and cook in a heavy lidded pot even without a tagine.

Method

1. Marinate. Mix the garlic, soaked saffron, ginger, turmeric, pepper and half the herbs with the olive oil, and rub the mixture into the chicken pieces. Cover and refrigerate for at least an hour, preferably overnight.
2. Line the pot with onion. Arrange the onion slices on the bottom of the tagine or heavy pot and lay the chicken pieces on top with all the marinade. The onion is the cushion that keeps the chicken from touching the bottom and burning, and it is also a major source of liquid.
3. Start a slow cook. Add the water or stock, adjust the salt carefully, cover, and cook over very low heat for 45-50 minutes. No stirring needed; just make sure the pot is barely bubbling.
4. Add lemon and olives. Add the olives and the preserved lemon quarters, if using, and cook another 15 minutes. This timing sets the flavor: preserved lemon cooked for a whole hour breaks down and releases bitterness, while in fifteen minutes it only releases its aroma.
5. Reduce if needed. If the sauce is too thin, remove the lid and raise the heat for 5-10 minutes. The sauce should coat the back of a spoon.
6. Finish with fresh herbs. Scatter the rest of the cilantro and parsley over the top; with the fresh lemon alternative, add the zest and juice to taste now. Turn off the heat and wait 5 minutes before serving.
7. Serve in the vessel itself, with Moroccan bread (khobz) to soak up the sauce, not with rice.

Nutrition facts and calorie estimate

The recommended serving is a quarter of the pot — about 215 grams of edible chicken with skin (from 300 grams of bone-in chicken), sauce and olives.

Two numbers in the table deserve attention. The first is fat, and the vast majority of it comes from the chicken skin: the skin is about a fifth of the weight of the edible meat, but it is five times as dense as the meat itself. Removing it before cooking brings the serving down to about 370 calories and the fat to about 18 grams, without touching the serving size — a difference of about 250 calories, the biggest difference a single component makes in any recipe on this page. On the other hand, the skin is also what gives the sauce its body, so a reasonable compromise is to cook with it and remove it before eating — that way some of the fat has already melted into the sauce, and the serving lands roughly in the middle.

The second is sodium. Preserved lemon and green olives are both salt-cured products, and together they bring the dish to a high sodium level before a single grain of salt has been added. Anyone watching their sodium intake should simply add no salt at all to this dish, and rinse the olives in water before using them.

Beyond these, 44 grams of protein and only 12 grams of carbohydrates make the dish naturally suitable for a low-carb diet — until the bread arrives to soak up the sauce and adds about 150-250 calories.

Variations and tips

• Skinless: About 370 calories per serving instead of 620, if you remove the skin before cooking. The only change that really alters the picture.
• Mhammer instead of mqualli: Replace the saffron and turmeric with smoked paprika and cumin and add 2 grated tomatoes. Same structure, a deeper red sauce.
• Vegan vegetable tagine: Replace the chicken with carrot, zucchini, pumpkin and chickpeas, and shorten to 35 minutes. About 320 calories per serving.
• Homemade preserved lemon: Lemon quarters stuffed with coarse salt and packed into a jar with lemon juice. Ready after 4 weeks and keeps for months.
• Making ahead: Improves on the second day and keeps in the fridge for 3 days. When reheating, add a little water, over low heat, covered.

Summary

Chicken tagine with preserved lemon and olives is a recipe that mainly demands patience and two good-quality salty ingredients. The conical vessel isn’t a gimmick — it is a condensation mechanism that allows cooking with almost no water, and that is what concentrates the sauce. Nutritionally it is a high-protein, low-carb dish whose calorie side is determined by the chicken skin — which alone decides about 250 calories per serving — and whose sodium is naturally high. It is served after zaalouk and before a sweet like chebakia. More recipes in Moroccan cuisine.